Wolf’s Monarchs headed to junior nationals

Thursday

Apr 4, 2013 at 3:15 AM

By John Doylejdoyle@fosters.com

SOMERSWORTH — Stevie Wolf is no stranger to championship hockey. He was part of the Somersworth High School team that won the Division III championship in 2011, and now wants to add a national championship to his resume.

Wolf’s current team, the New Hampshire Junior Monarchs, will compete in the 2013 USA Hockey Tier III Junior Nationals this weekend in Rochester, Minn. The tournament invites only the eight league champions that comprise the Tier III junior hockey league teams. The Monarchs last month won the Empire League tournament in Wayne, N.J.

Wolf started his high-school hockey career at Berwick (Maine) Academy, before transferring to Somersworth for his junior year. Wolf put up 73 points as a junior when he averaged more than three points per game and Somersworth ran the table in winning the Division III title.

Although his Monarchs team is not undefeated, Wolf said the expectations are just as high for his current team as it was for the Hilltoppers two years ago.

“It’s always a good story to tell,” Wolf said about the Hilltoppers’ championship season. “It’s nice to win a championship. We (the Monarchs) have been in first since the first week, so it would (stink) to lose after being in first place all year.”

In 2012 Wolf started the season with the Monarchs but returned to Somersworth High School and finished the season scoring 32 points for the Hilltoppers, giving him 105 for his career in 38 games. Wolf became the 19th player in the program’s history to reach the milestone.

His team went 17-0 to start the season, losing its first game in Portland, Maine, just before the holiday break. “We were undefeated for a while,” Wolf said. “It was a good streak.”

As the No. 1 seed, the Monarchs went 6-0 in their league tournament to earn their trip to Minnesota, beating a team from Foxborough, Mass., in the final.

“It was the fourth time we’d played them,” Wolf said. “We had already beaten them three times. They were the No. 2 seed and we matched up with them well. We were confident. It seemed like they didn’t want anything to do with the game once it started.”

The Monarchs took a 1-0 lead into the third period, expanded their lead to 3-0 before Foxborough scored a garbage-time goal to account for the final score.”Junior Monarchs head coach and general manager Ryan Frew had high praise for Wolf.“He’s always the first one on the ice and the last one off during practice,” Frew said. “In addition he is intelligent, he proved to be very quick learning our complicated systems and being able to teach them to his teammates.”

Wolf has eight goals and seven assists in 34 games for the Junior Monarchs, who went 33-6-1 during the regular season.

The national tournament consists of 16 teams in four pools of four teams each. The Monarchs will play three round-robin games, then the top two in each division will advance to the knockout round.

“It’s so much faster than high school hockey,” Wolf said about junior hockey. “It’s so much faster to play. It’s a different game, a lot tougher. The refs let a lot more go. It separates the men from the boys.”

Junior hockey is also a lot more time consuming than high school hockey, according to Wolf.“We practice three days a week and usually play two games a weekend,” he said. “Sometimes three. We’ve been going since September and we’re practicing still.”